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In these days of easy travelling there lies a choice of two routes to Paestum and its temples: one by driving thither direct from La Cava or Salerno, in the mode of our forefathers; and the other by taking the train to the little junction of Battipaglia, and thence proceeding southward by the coast line to the station of Pesto itself, that stands almost within a stone’s throw of the chief gate of Poseidonia.
In Italy accordingly the sea-god Poseidon was worshipped only in the Greek colonies, where however he had two famous cults, one at Tarentum, later called Colonia Neptunia, and one at Paestum, whose old name was Poseidonia.
With this brief introduction to the history of a city, whose chief building is still standing almost intact after a lapse of 2500 years, let us take a rapid survey of Poseidonia as it exists to-day. Its walls, of Greek construction but probably built or restored as late as the time of Alexander of Epirus, who gave the captured town a fleeting spell of liberty, form an irregular pentagon about three miles in circumference, whereon the remains of eight towers can be observed, whilst the four gates, placed at the four cardinal points of the compass, are clearly traceable. We enter this citt
Late in the seventh century before Christ, the Greek colony of Poseidonia, the city of the Sea God, was founded on or near the site of Italian Peste by certain Hellenic adventurers from Trœzen, who were amongst the inhabitants of Sybaris, at that time one of the most flourishing of the famous cities of Magna Graecia: and this new colony of Trœzenians henceforward was accounted one of the twenty-five subject-towns that recognised Sybaris for their metropolis, or mother and suzerain city.
Astyphilus of Poseidonia, a soothsayer and an intimate friend of Kimon's, told him that it portended his death, on the following grounds.
Fancy the irate disgust of Duke Robert at waking to learn that the antique fountain for his new Cathedral, brought with such care and toil from distant Poseidonia, should have been transported to the rival city and turned to such base uses!
Every remaining piece of sculpture and of marble was removed, and it was only the vast size of the pillars of the three great temples, and the consequent difficulty attending their transport by boat across the bay or along the marshy ground of the coast line, that saved from destruction these magnificent relics of “the glory that was Greece.” But even humble Capaccio did not afford a final resting-place to the harried Paestani, for in the year 1245 the great Emperor Frederick II., who had been defied by the feudal Counts of Capaccio, besieged and utterly destroyed this stronghold of the mountains that had been the child of Poseidonia of the sea-girt plains.
For a brief interval of years Poseidonia regained its lost liberty and its Hellenic name, but with the overthrow and death of Alexander of Epirus, the scattered hordes pressed down once more from their mountain fastnesses upon the rich plain, and the city was for the second time enslaved by the ruder conquering race.
With the fall of the mother city, this flourishing colony was left alone to face the attacks of the Samnites, the native barbarians who peopled the dense forests and the barren mountains of Lucania; yet it somehow contrived to retain its independence until the close of the fourth century B.C., when the Samnite hordes, forcing the fortified line of the Silarus, made themselves masters of Poseidonia, and put an end, practically for ever, to its existence as a purely Hellenic city.
Here then within these bare and ruined walls were mother and daughter worshipped by the people of Poseidonia, who reasonably considered that the two goddesses of the Earth should have their habitation as near as possible to the Sanctuary of the Sovereign of Ocean.
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